


My God Of Bleeding Suns And Weeping Skies

by blueberrysebby



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Anorexia Athletica, Blood, Canon Compliant, Character Death, Dark, Dead Steve Rogers - Freeform, Depression, Drowning, Eating Disorders, Hurt No Comfort, M/M, POV Bucky Barnes, Post-Endgame, Quote: I'm with you 'til the end of the line, Sad Ending, Self-Hatred, Self-Mutilation, Somehow, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide, Talking To Dead People, Trauma, Triggers, Two of them, Unrequited Love, in his mind, kind of, slightly afraid of posting this, so far at least, very dark
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-15
Updated: 2019-08-15
Packaged: 2020-09-01 09:56:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,144
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20256238
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blueberrysebby/pseuds/blueberrysebby
Summary: After the events of Endgame, Bucky falls into a very dark mental place. But this time, Steve Rogers is not the last thing preventing him from suicide. Because Steve Rogers is dead.





	My God Of Bleeding Suns And Weeping Skies

**Author's Note:**

> First of all, although it is in the tags:  
HEAVY TRIGGER WARNING!!!  
This story contains explicit mentions of:  
-suicide  
-suicidal thoughts  
-an eating disorder, specifically anorexia athletica/nervosa, and symptoms and consequnces thereof  
-extreme self-harm, specifically cutting and self-mutilation  
-blood and injuries  
-physical and mental trauma and resulting disorders  
-depression  
-self-hatred  
It also contains mentions of abuse, brainwashing and nightmares.  
If there is anything else potentially triggering that I don't mention above, please comment it and I will include it.  
I want to provide a safe reading experience for everyone, and I'd rather go slightly overboard with warnings than risk anyone's wellbeing. Please do not read or be very mindful reading this if you struggle with any of the things mentioned above.
> 
> I'm honestly a bit scared of posting this, firstly because I don't want to publish any content that's potentially harmful to people in high-risk groups, secondly because, like many others, I've dealt with several of the issues mentioned above and Bucky has been a character I could project onto and who has helped me deal with these issues.  
I've specifically not tagged this as 'angst', because that tends to sound romantifying to me. And of course, in a way writing stories like this one is romantifying by definition. On the other hand, I've been trying to describe Bucky's struggles as realistically (and partly drastically) as possible and according to my own experiences. He is a heavily traumatized person who hasn't had control over the majority of his life and struggles with a lot of guilt, fear and loneliness. This story, based in part on Sebastian Stan's comment that Steve, in the time between The Winter Soldier and Civil War, was probably the only thing preventing Bucky from committing suicide, deals with how Bucky, who had only partly recovered before Infinity War and is still in a fragile mental condition, might in the worst (although not unrealistic) case deal with Steve abandoning him at the end of Endgame to spend his life with Peggy. 
> 
> Please be safe, don't hurt yourself, and remember that in the end, we're all odd clusters of stardust with the curious ability to see beauty, and to imagine.

**My God Of Bleeding Suns And Weeping Skies**

I remember the last time I saw you whenever I close my eyes, in the pastel pink and blue of dusk by the lake. Of course, I knew. But hope, hope ignores knowledge. For a dying moth of a moment, I still saw _you_, gold and blue, like a flower from Elysium. Like never quite from this world. But you were already gone, long gone.

You did not stay long after that. In the time you were there, we never really spoke. There was too much there, between us, more than could ever be within me from Hydra. That was not a choice I ever got to make. It was not my life. Not me. It was my body and their commands. You made your choice. We were a life apart.

I was at your funeral. Thousands of people were. I did not cry. It was like burying a stranger. I was only one of them all.

They are taking good care of me, in case you were wondering. We are still here. Every morning I wake up to the sun on the lake. Sometimes I think it glows at night, arc reactor blue. I know it can’t be, because it’s another lake. We’re at the Compound, Sam and I and Wanda and Bruce. The others are scattered in all directions of the wind. Sometimes they visit. Maybe.

Every morning I wake up from beautiful dreams. You are always with me. I used to have nightmares about losing you. All my life. I used to wake up in cold sweat and check your breath when we were children in a blanket fort at your place. I used to lie awake and feel your pulse every few minutes when you were sick, when we were alone and I spent the nights on a chair by your bedside. I used to see you die a thousand ways in my dreams in the war before you found me, and afterwards still.

No more. Last night we sat on the shore on Coney Island, and you had strawberry ice cream. It was perfect. It melted with you into the sunset, same colour as your lips, and then your hair, and then the sickle moon rose thrice – in the sky and in the water and in your eyes. Your knuckles were bruised and your knees scabby, and I carried you home part of the way, on my back, like a weary swallow, always only a flutter, a dive flight away from death.

Every morning I wake up.

It feels like crashing and still falling at the same time. My body aches. It is so heavy I can barely breathe. Sometimes I don’t. I breathe out and not back in, because I can’t find the strength.

I would not leave the bed were it not for Sam. I make him blueberry pancakes when he comes back from his run every morning. I have started telling him I already ate before he came back. I didn’t. I can’t eat. Everything makes me sick. And when I don’t eat, sometime by early afternoon, everything starts to feel light. It’s like a vacuum in my stomach. It presses on my heart and on my lungs, makes it hard to breathe. After a while, I could feel it in my shoulders, in my real arm. A constant numbness, a heavy weightlessness. Moving them is becoming harder. I wonder if this is how you felt, far far back, when I could feel your ribs through our clothes when I held you in my arms in winter nights. When your breath was so shallow I had to lay my hand on your chest to know if you were still alive. When you were always cold. I am, now.

When Sam is done with breakfast, I go out. I used to do laps around the lake. Now my legs won’t really carry me, I feel shaky most of the time, so I run to the wood on the far side and lie on a bench there on the shore behind a tree. You can’t see it from the Compound. Mostly I just lie there, feel the wood against my spine through my hoodie, look up at the swaying, rustling tree tops. Sometimes I fall asleep again. Those are the best days.

I am so sorry. So sorry for everything. It is autumn now and every floating leaf on the lake reminds me of Tony. I want to apologize to him, but even if he were still alive I wouldn’t know how. What are words even good for these days. Nothing I can say now returns anyone or anything. And I wouldn’t ask for a second chance. If I could ask for anything, I would ask never to be born.

Still I catch myself missing a time that never was.

What would have been had I never been drafted? If we had never gone to war? I know it was all you ever wanted – to be a soldier, like your father, your father whom you never knew. What if I had been able to take care of you enough to make you stop feeling like you always had something to prove? What if I had been able to let you know that you were enough, always, and that no one in the whole wide world could be more loved? Your ma loved you so much. And I cannot say I loved you more, but maybe I did, just because I had more time to love you.

You were always stronger than all the rest. What if that had been enough?

We would both be long dead. Nobody would remember us. But maybe we would have had a happy life. Not heroic, not memorable, but happy. We would never have killed a single soul.

You would never have met Peggy.

Sometimes I imagine swans on the lake, and while all the others would leave in the winter, one would stay, and he would be black, and he would never leave, and no one would know why.

But as everything else these days, they are only in my mind.

Ghosts.

No one else remembers.

Sometimes I wish that Shuri had never been able to heal me. Just so I could forget – not everything else, but myself. It has something comforting, someone else being responsible.

Sometimes I miss the excruciating pain. The torture. The moment when they wiped me, and for a moment it was all drowned out in scream and pain. Nothing else left.

I need the pain. The blood forms beautiful shapes in the water of the plain white sink; you might have drawn them as creatures, dragons and will-o’-the-wisps. If I knew then what I know now, maybe I would kneel before you and kiss the wounds on your hands, kiss you whole, kiss you better. Now I watch the blood make lines that have no end, and the moment my skin breaks under the blade everything screams inside me, but it deafens all the voices, the memories, the loss. I don’t want to stop. It is good, hurting my body. Giving into the hate. It has hurt, killed, so many; it is all that holds me here; yet it was never enough. I should not even be here anymore. I should have given myself long ago. I want to just have died for you, in a world that no longer exists.

Sam barely talked either the first weeks. He misses you too. But he has lost and missed before. You were right, giving him the shield. He will carry it proudly when I follow you.

He thinks I am grieving. Gives me space. Doesn’t ask questions. We train together every day except on weekends. I cannot keep up with him now. I tell him I don’t want to embarrass him, so I hold back. We used to joke like that, remember? So he believes me. He hasn’t changed. Maybe become stronger in every aspect, nothing else.

He hands me a protein bar after every session. Mostly it’s the only thing I eat all day.

At night I cling to my ribs and imagine they were yours.

I wonder what your body felt like after the serum. What it would have felt like as close to me as it used to be. I knew you so well back then, could finish your sentences, your thoughts, could sense your presence. Knew your body, in the most innocent of ways. Every corner of it, every birthmark, every inch of moon-coloured skin. I loved everything you hated about yourself. You may have drawn all the real pictures, but in my mind I painted you every time your hair gleamed in the morning sun on our way to school, every time your cracked lips parted to speak or you bit them with your teeth, every time your eyes were bloodshot and shone the brighter, the bluer in your sweat-glistening face when you had a fever, when you were crying without noticing and every glance might have been the last. Sometimes I am selfish and wish it had ended one of those days. I would just have stayed in the war. Dropped myself on a grenade, like you would never hesitate to.

You hated everything about yourself, but to me, you were always perfect. I see your colours everywhere still, every day. Red dawn and golden dusk, deep blue days of rain on the sea. You were my god of bleeding suns and weeping skies. I worshipped each breath of your existence. I would have died for you, over and over. I would have lived for you, too, and I did. But you somehow never saw.

And sometimes now I think I never knew you at all.

I try to understand you like I thought I used to, but I fail.

How many times did you save me? If someone asked me, I could not answer. Sure, I was first in saving you. Saving your body that was too weak for your heart, your spirit, your courage. But only until your time was finally come. I only kept you safe, so you could keep the world safe. It was only fitting that through serving you I served the world. Because ultimately it was yours.

You were always the one meant to lead, and I would follow you anywhere.

But then I wonder: why did you save me? Why did you find me? Why did you risk everything? In Austria. In Washington D.C. In Bucharest. In Berlin. In Leipzig. In Siberia. What made you believe in me when no one else would? I could have killed you, I nearly did. I remember your face up there, the yellow bruises and the blood. I was so scared, and you were the only one who knew. You would have died for me, through me, rather than giving me up. And that was the only thing I knew. The only thing keeping me alive in Romania. Something in me knew you would come for me. You did. And although I couldn’t say it at the time, I was never so grateful. You looked just like in the museum paintings that day, a hero that could save the world all by himself. I was scared, lonely, haunted, but I knew the second I saw you you would die for me like I would die for you.

I don’t understand what happened.

You went into exile to protect me. When I was in Wakanda, the times you came visiting or we talked over computer, there was always something in me wanting to ask you why. But I never dared. I had spent most of my conscious life not sure what we actually had. I never asked. I was afraid it would scare you. Ruin it, maybe. I was afraid I felt something you didn’t and never would.

And then suddenly it was too late.

I only just had you back.

Then you left.

And I don’t accuse you. There is no blame. There is only one question:

Why?

I’ve written it in cuts all over my body.

It still didn’t hurt as much as it does in my mind.

The lines on my body, I could make them never end if I wanted. But our line, our promise – you tore it, and I wonder what part of it I got wrong. But maybe it was because I said it first, and I meant the end of all things.

Sometimes I dream of falling. But you find me like you would always find me, and in the middle of snow and nothingness I would only see your face, and you would allow me to die in your arms.

Sometimes I dream of a time we never had, of days with you in your healthy, strong body back in Brooklyn, in your old apartment. I can smell the morning sun on the bare brick walls, can taste the sweetish scent of breakfast tea on my tongue, can feel your supple, milky skin against mine as we lean onto the iron rail of the fire escape and gaze out onto the hazy city. Your soft giggle and chuckle and joyful belly-laugh – the purest sounds in the world. Still I can only really remember them in my dreams. It wasn’t easy to make you laugh, but somehow my dumb jokes mostly did the deal. There are no records of your laughter. Or of the soft scratch of your pencil on paper at the breakfast table. Sometimes you would draw me looking at you over my pancakes, for lack of a better model. It made me let the pancakes go cold every time. I couldn’t move when you drew me. I could only watch your hands, the violet veins and glassy bones moving under your translucent skin, the crescents in your finger nails, the wavy bumps in them that were like tree rings for your sicknesses, a tiny chronicle of bad and worse days and the few bright ones in between. I wish I had one of those drawings now; maybe I could still feel your hands on the paper. They never touched me as softly, not on purpose.

I would not touch me softly either. I would not touch me at all. I am a bad omen; pain and death hover in my wake. It is as though I carried the war in me wherever I go still. But you know, you of all people know I never wanted to hurt anyone.

When I say you were never meant for this world, it is because you were too pure a thing, too breakable in all your fierce strength.

When I say I was never meant for this world, it is because it has left me behind. I should never have survived my fall. I should have died that day. And sometimes I think that Hydra’s true crime was not to make me do what they did, but to make me live at all.

I shed no tear when they carried you past me in your lily-white coffin underneath the flag and the wreath. They all did, but they never knew you.

Now I cry every morning, every conscious minute of the day, and every waking hour of the night. I cannot look in the mirror, for I still see you there, shaving, combing back your hair, all serious, yet when you saw my reflection looking you looked back with a sweet smile that lit up your icicle eyes.

And then I see you dead. Pale, blue, cold. All shine about you gone. Just soft, stiff, scarred hands on blankets over blankets, and your face so suddenly at peace, at last. Perfect beauty, but already gone. And then I cry. Because the dreams are true. They are now. There is no cold-sweat waking up to find you, barely breathing but, yes, breathing, cradled in my arms. There is no place where you are safe now.

I lost you. I lose you. I will lose you more still.

And I can’t bear a single breath in that knowledge. I don’t want to breathe anymore. Lose more memory. But I cannot keep it either. It makes me feel guilty. Because only now I see that all my memories are tinted by something you never felt.

A few weeks ago, Wanda took me swimming. I wore shorts and a swim shirt; didn’t want her to think that anything was wrong. It was a hot late summer day, but I was so cold in the water I could barely breathe. I was trembling and stiff and my heart felt tight. I left the water after less than five minutes because I couldn’t keep my head above the surface.

Today is windy, cold, grey. The colourful leaves are gone. There are tiny stirrings on the lake, like fresh cuts in skin.

When I shed my jacket the cold seizes me, makes it hard to move. My naked body wants warmth, refuge, but if seventy years of Hydra have done anything for me, then that is utter body control. There is to be no cold, no weariness, no pain, no fear.

There are stairs into the lake near my usual bench. The water is even colder than the wind, harsher. My knife’s blade is eleven centimetres long and four millimetres thick by the hilt. It is made from one piece of blackened steel. The bare vibranium of my left hand can barely hold it. Tightly gripped, I place it in the crook of my arm, the tip into my vein, and push, and pull through to my wrist. My ears ring. Blood throbs from the cut. Endless. I bring the knife into my numb right hand, take two, three steps deeper, to my hips, blood running straight into water. Cling to the hilt, set the blade to my left shoulder, where the vibranium is amalgamated with scarred tissue. Set my teeth and sink the tip of the blade into the angry, ugly scar. It screams, screams blood. I cannot see anymore. Just stab again, higher, and again, lever the metal arm from the flesh, tear up the scar. Drop the knife, dig my fingers into the gash, pull it off, the metal from the flesh, the wires from my spinal cord. All I hear is blood, pulsing.

I see you, Steve Rogers. For the first time. Beaten blue and bloody and stripped of all clothes, a pale skeletal body in a stinking back alley puddle. For the first time, I see you die.

Now I can almost reach your hand as the water fills our lungs, our alveoli are bubble leaves on underwater trees, and you open your eyes and they are the universe, and we are, together, stardust, infinite. Almost. 


End file.
